WASHINGTON GOP BLEW THE ALABAMA RACE BUT NOT LIKE YOU THINK: LifeZette’s Brendan Kirby quotes a former Alabama Republican State Chairman Marty Connors pointed to the GOP’s failure to produce on its promises as a determining factor:

“If you go to any watering hole in suburban Alabama or rural Alabama, everybody is very, very angry at Washington and they are blaming Republicans, which is the rise of Roy Moore in this race. Had tax reform had been passed two or three months ago, this would not have been an issue. If Obamacare had been repealed, this would not have been an issue.”

Hmmm, maybe that Barnett feller at Georgetown has a point!

CONSERVATIVE ICON SEES FOUR REASONS FOR A MOORE WIN: Dan Oliver has seen it all, heard it all. Former FTC Commissioner, chairman of the board for National Review during its golden Buckley era and much, much more.

In his Tuesday Washington Times column, Oliver lays out four imminently reasonable factors he thinks point to a Roy Moore win in today’s Alabama special election for the U.S. Senate seat formerly held by Attorney General Jeff Sessions.

Here’s Oliver’s opening: “First, the Moore story was broken by The Washington Post, which has little or no credibility among Trump supporters, who also tend to be Roy Moore supporters. Having savaged Donald Trump relentlessly, The Post is seen as a propaganda arm of the Democratic Party. Nevertheless, and ironically, The Post’s story on Mr. Moore may have been factually correct.”

Worth the click to get Oliver’s other three factors.

FRANKEN, BARTON, CONYERS, ETC. WILL IT NEVER END?: Dr. Albert Mohler, president of the Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, offers a trenchant analysis of what’s fueling the burgeoning congressional sex scandal and why it isn’t likely to end soon. Check out the first segment of his Friday podcast, “The Combustible Mix of Scandal, Moral Relativism and Political Expediency.”

NOT SO FAST ON THAT NATIONAL CONCEALED CARRY RECIPROCITY BILL: Legislation mandating 50-state recognition of concealed carry permits is making its way through Congress, much to the delight of gun owners and Second Amendment defenders. But Rep. Thomas Massie, R-KY, tells LifeZette’s Jim Stinson the proposal contains a bad bargain.

“They’re going to get a little bit of gun control in the mix with it,” Massie told Stinson. “States and federal agencies will be coerced to put more names in the database.” How can that be? Well, the Senate version of the proposal is co-sponsored by Sen. Dianne Feinstein, D-CA., and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York. They want to give $625 million to states to expand the National Instant Criminal Background Check (NCIS) database.

Stinson reports that Massie “is perplexed as to why Republican leadership in the House and the Senate is rushing to enhance NICS, when former President Barack Obama used the system to bar gun ownership based on what Social Security reported to the database on mental disabilities. Massie said he even suspects concealed carry could be stripped out of the final bill, the apparent aim of Feinstein and Schumer all along.”

Stinson said Gun Owners of America (GOA) opposes the Senate measure. The NRA backs the House version of the proposal.

CHARITY FRAUD NETS EX-CONGRESSWOMAN FIVE YEARS IN PRISON: Former Rep. Corrine Brown, D-FL, was sentenced earlier today to five years in prison for what her judge described as “a crime born out of entitlement and greed.” Specifically, Brown raised an estimated $800,000 for a sham charity, according to the Tallahassee Democrat. She was convicted earlier this year on 18 of 22 charges that included tax fraud and lying on her congressional spending reports. She represented a Jacksonville district for 25 years. By comparison, the Clinton Foundation charity run by Bill and Hillary Clinton since 1997 raised more than $233 million in 2016 alone.

DOES SAME-SEX MARRIAGE TRUMP THE FIRST FREEDOM IN THE FIRST AMENDMENT? That’s the essential question facing the U.S. Supreme Court as it deliberates in what quite possibly will become a landmark case. Remember the name: Masterpiece Cakeshop v Colorado Civil Rights Commission. The Court hears oral arguments Tuesday.

Jack Phillips, owner of the cakeshop, refused five years ago to design a wedding cake for a gay couple’s ceremony. An evangelical Christian, Phillips believes his creative participation in a process that violates his faith would make him a party to legitimizing sin. The bureaucrats at the commission ruled that protecting same-sex marriage is more important than upholding Philips’ exercise of the first freedom named in the First Amendment.

The case has occasioned a deluge of politically correct mis-information and mis-representation in the national media, as exemplified by this recent op-ed in the New York Times. I refer readers to NRO’s sage David French for the critical analysis there. One wonders how long before a Muslim man asks the Court to affirm his right to marry a nine-year-old girl.

In the meantime, the Alliance Defending Freedom – the evangelical legal defense group representing Philips – offers a collection of the key documents in the case, an overview of the facts that occasion the litigation, and a summary of the legal issues at stake. They just don’t come any more significant than this one.

UPDATE: George Will also gets the Masterpiece Cakeshop wrong, according to French.

SHOULD “MADE IN CHINA” BE STAMPED ON THOSE NORTH KOREAN MISSILES? Well, ask yourself how a country so isolated and poor that it can’t properly feed its soldiers obtains the costly and sophisticated materials and technology that go into an ICBM. Or, as Steve Mosher put it on LifeZette today:

“Even more to the point, how did a dirt-poor country that can barely manage to feed its people acquire the sophisticated technical and manufacturing know-how necessary to build nuclear weapons and deploy ballistic missiles? The answer is that it didn’t. Instead, it relied upon its only ally, China — the one country to which it is bound by a mutual defense treaty — to provide these things.”

So, here’s another question: Is China on the one hand telling the U.S. it will will help convince North Korea to stop developing nuclear missiles capable of hitting the continental U.S. while on the other shipping the very parts and know-how that make those lethal weapons a reality? Mosher’s answer is deeply disturbing.

THIS IS WHY AMERICANS DON’T TRUST THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA: Pick up today’s Washington Post and scan the lead story headlined “GOP Secures Senate Votes To Pass Tax Bill.” So far, so good. Then check out the first sub-head: “MOST BENEFITS FOR BUSINESSES, WEALTHY.” That’s the controlling assumption of the analysis – not “objective reporting” – that follows.

The story’s lede claims the bill “bestows massive benefits on corporate America and the wealthy while delivering mixed blessings to everybody else.” Tax cuts mostly benefit the rich is the standard Democrat talking point and Post reporters Erica Werner and Damian Paletta dutifully frame their reporting in such terms.

But do the wealthy get bigger tax cuts than the middle class or the poor? Depends on how the effects of the cuts are measured. The Post reporters cite a Joint Committee on Taxation analysis that, among much else, concludes “only 44 percent of taxpayers would see see their burden reduced by more than $500 in 2019 but that high earners would fare much better than the poor under the bill.”

What the Post reporters don’t tell readers is that other measures of the Senate tax cut bill’s effects contradict their chosen – Democratic – narrative. To cite just one example, the Cato Institute’s Chris Edwards looked at the aggregate percentage cuts by income range. Taxpayers earning $40,000 to $50,000 annually would see a 51 percent reduction. Similarly, those earning $75,000 to $100,000 would see a 17 percent aggregate reduction.

And the wealthy? Edwards calculated a 5.8 percent cut for those earning $1 million or more annually.

There other ways to slice and dice the effects of the Senate bill, but don’t look to the Post story for such useful information. And then journalists wonder why most Americans don’t believe them?

Their disbelief is deep indeed, as seen in the recent HarvardHarris Poll, as reported by The Hill, which said “65 percent of voters believe there is a lot of fake news in the mainstream media. That number includes 80 percent of Republicans, 60 percent of independents and 53 percent of Democrats.”

BTW, the online version of the Post story is no better even though there is infinitely more space to provide balance.

ANOTHER NO RUSSIA COLLUSION “THERE” THERE UPDATE: Former federal prosecutor Joseph DiGenova tells Fox News’ Laura Ingraham the Flynn indictment is another nothing-burger in Russia collusion. Maybe the strangest part of it, though, is why Flynn lied about legal activities:

“All of Flynn’s conversations with the ambassador to Russia were perfectly legal during the transition period and even before. It’s not a crime to communicate with an ambassador of a foreign country about foreign policy when you are the foreign policy adviser to the incoming president. So I don’t know why he lied. It’s inconceivable to me. If he had told the truth, there would be no crime.”

THIS TOP OBAMA APPOINTEE LIVED HIGH ON THE HOG AND YOU PAID FOR IT: Stefan Selig started a senior position as an Obama political appointee at the Department of Commerce in November 2013. In the following weeks, here’s a few of the ways he spent tax dollars, according to the Inspector General:

• $1,150 per night at a luxury hotel in Geneva, Switzerland, where the approved per-diem rate is $350.
• $1,800 for rides in a luxury SUV during a two-day trip to Boston.
• $50,000 for changes to his D.C. office suite, 10 times the $5,000 office renovation stipend federal law grants political appointees (the carpet alone cost $10,000).
• $270 per night at a Memphis, Tennessee hotel, 240 percent higher than the standard per-diem rate.
• $450 for a luxury hotel in New York City, 230 percent higher than the standard per-diem rate.

The Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson reports the IG began looking into Selig’s spending after getting a confidential tip sometime in 2015. But in its report made public this week, the IG said nothing about recommending prosecution. Stay tuned for what happens next week when Watson starts asking questions folks at the Commerce Department probably aren’t going to want to answer.

HERE’S HOW THE CLINTON FOUNDATION DECEIVED THE IRS AND GOT AWAY WITH IT: A little lie here, another bigger one there, and in a few years, Clinton insiders transformed a presidential library project into a global network for selling political influence and access on a never-before-seen scale. NOTE: When I posted a link to the story on my Facebook page earlier today, Facebook promptly deleted it. Their notification offered the option of fill out a form to object. Can somebody please show me where that appears in the First Amendment?

UPDATE: Just received this from a Facebook spokesman:

“The post was removed in error and restored as soon as we were able to investigate. Our team processes millions of reports each week, and we sometimes get things wrong. We’re very sorry about this mistake.”

FEDS TOLD TO FIND THE FUGITIVE FELONS LIVING IN PUBLIC HOUSING AND EVICT THEM: Does good old fashioned shoe-leather reporting still make a difference? Consider Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group. His work exposed the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s failure to enforce the law barring fugitive felons from living in public housing.

And now, as Barton reports today, Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley is telling the HUD Inspector General to stop playing games about a previously unpublished 2012 report. That document estimated that 1,300 fugitive felons were living in public housing in just one HUD region. Grassley thinks it’s time for government officials to get serious about finding such fugitives and removing them, as required by federal law.

“’It is troubling that the full number of wanted fugitive felons living in public housing remains unknown, unexplained, undocumented and unjustified,’ the Iowa Republican wrote in a letter to HUD Inspector General (IG) David Montoya Wednesday. ‘Tenants deserve to know if a wanted fugitive felon is living in the same housing project.’

“So, Grassley wants the HUD IG to do ‘a thorough, nationwide investigation into the number of wanted fugitive felons living in public housing and the adequacy of controls in place to prevent that from occurring. The American people need assurance that HUD is enforcing the law and ensuring the safety and security of public housing tenants.’”

Grassley’s directive culminated a process that began several weeks ago when Barton first reported the 2012 document. When he asked the IG what was done about the 1,300 fugitive felons, he got the run-around and a claim the report was never published because it was based on faulty data. But what made the data faulty was never explained, to Barton or to Grassley.

It will take a while but ultimately Grassley’s directive should result in hundreds of dangerous criminals being removed from public housing and brought to justice. No telling how many murders and rapes will never happen now because a persistent journalist refused to go away.

IS THE NRC ABOUT TO ENABLE AN AMERICAN CHERNOBYL BY TERRORISTS? Dozens of people died when the Soviet Union’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant malfunctioned, melted down and spewed radioactivity over a broad swath of the Ukraine’s geography. A new Inspector General report includes a terrifying peek at what could happen here.

The problem is the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s bureaucracy doesn’t know how many digital information systems it has that handle classified information and thus cannot ensure their security, according to the IG, reports the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Katie Watson.

“Failing to assess a system’s risks appropriately before using it could enable hackers to gain access to classified information, although the IG didn’t find any instances of that happening,” at least not yet, Watson reports. It is possible, of course, for hackers to leave no evidence of their presence.

“If a hard drive with classified information is put into a computer only authorized for unclassified information, there could be an information spill and the information may be vulnerable because the computer does not have the proper protections in place,” the IG said.

Could such an event enable hackers working for ISIS or other terrorist groups gaining sufficient access to a U.S. nuclear plant’s controls to cause it to malfunction? Chernobyl was caused by an unexplained power surge.

GRASSLEY WANTS TO KNOW WHY FEDS AREN’T ENFORCING THE LAW: Federal law bars fugitives from the law from living, even temporarily, in tax-funded public housing. But an unpublished Inspector General report in 2012 found an estimated 1,300 such fugitives in just one region of the Department of Housing and Urban Development, according to Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Charles Grassley isn’t buying the HUD IG’s claim the report wasn’t published because of “data problems” when it was completed. The IG also said the report was a draft, despite the fact such status was nowhere indicated on the copy obtained by TheDCNF.

“The HUD Inspector General needs to explain whether the wanted fugitive felon report was final or not and if there are problems with the data,” Grassley told The Daily Caller News Foundation. “And HUD needs to explain why the federal law isn’t being enforced.”

“These discrepancies don’t inspire confidence that the agency has a good handle on wanted fugitive felons in public housing or that the residents are being adequately protected. Inspector general reports should be public with very few exceptions,” he said.

Here’s the really troubling question: If there are 1,300 in one HUD region four years ago, how many are there across the nation today?

NURSE HAS LONG NAILS AND NO GLOVES? NO PROBLEM, SAYS UNION: So imagine you are the patient and your nurse comes in to change the dressing on your incision. You notice she’s not wearing latex gloves. And worse, she has long artificial fingernails, which are known to harbor potentially lethal germs. What do you do?

What you do is shut up and take it, according to the American Federation of Government Employees, which represents Federal Bureau of Prisons employees. When managers at the Rochester, Minn., facilities announced a rule banning employees with such fingernails from working with certain patients, the union balked.

After negotiations failed, the issue had to be resolved by federal arbiters. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports the unexpected details of the arbiters’ decisions.

LAWYERS FOR ENVIRONMENTAL ACTIVISTS GROUPS GET MILLIONS IN TAX DOLLARS: They do it by filing “citizen suits” demanding more regulation by the Environmental Protection Agency, Department of Interior and other federal agencies, according to Michael Bastasch and Ethan Barton of the Daily Caller News Foundation.

The suits are authorized – some might say invited – under the Endangered Species Act (ESA), Clean Air Act (CAA) and Clean Water Act (CWA), among others. These “sue and settle” legal charades happen behind closed doors where the lawyers for the activists groups confer with lawyers for the government to work out a “settlement.”

The lawyers fees for the plaintiffs are paid by the taxpayers, a provision of the laws which provides a significant incentive to do as many depositions and file the maximum number of motions before the settlement talks commence.

“Federal agencies paid out $30 million to attorneys for 237 citizen suits under the ESA. Citizen suits under CAA paid out the second most, at $13 million for 224 suits, and the 51 CWA suits resulted in $6.7 million in federal payments,” according to Bastasch and Barton.

The Sierra Club is the most frequent user the provision, suing federal agencies 34 times between 2009 and 2012, often represented by Earthjustice, which was spun-off of the club in 1997.

“Earthjustice has received $4 million from suing federal agencies 39 times since 2009, according to TheDCNF’s findings. The group declined to speak with TheDCNF when asked about getting attorney’s fees paid for when suing the government,” according to Bastasch and Barton.

VA HOSPITAL BOUGHT $311,000 IN TVS “BECAUSE THEY HAD FUNDS AVAILABLE:”  Taxpayers give bureaucrats money so bureaucrats can spend it just because they have it. That’s apparently the attitude the prompted officials at the Department of Veterans Affairs Detroit hospital to buy $311,000 worth of TVs that were never used and ended up in storage.

Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group reports that the TVs were bought in 2013 and intended for use in a new patient area to be constructed. Three years later and the new patient area has yet to be built and the warranties on the unused TVs have expired.

HILLARY AIDE OKAYED ABU DHABI DEAL THAT PAID BILL $500,000 FOR A SPEECH: Richard Nixon had an 18-minute gap in a tape recording that was well and truly erased. Hillary Clinton has thousands of emails that were deleted but can never be erased. Slowly but surely, they are seeing the light of day and they are revealing.

The latest emails exposed are from 2012 and they shed new light on how the Clintons used their offices to enrich themselves through the Clinton Foundation, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Richard Pollock. TAQA is an Abu Dhabi-based oil and gas company with operations in 11 countries, including the U.S. and Canada.

“The emails show foundation officials were trying to complete a deal offered by TAQA managing director Leo Koot in Scotland. He agreed to give $60,000 to the foundation for Bill to speak at a Scotland charity and auction. The winner of the auction was to get a ‘Special Day with President Bill Clinton in New York,'” Pollock reports.

“The foundation accepted the $60,000, and Bill went to Scotland where he received an additional $250,000 to $500,000 for his speech before a group called ‘Business For Change,’ according to the Foundation’s website,” Pollock said.

Cheryl Mills, Hillary’s Chief of Staff, okayed the deal in private discussions with Clinton Foundation officials while her boss was in Bangladesh publicly defending another Clinton Foundation donor who was in hot water in that country over questionable accounting of government funds. And so on and so on and so on and …..

WHAT JOB PAYS THE MOST FOR DOING THE LEAST WORK? Try running a local public housing authority in a small town like Linden, New Jersey, Clayton, Oklahoma or Mabank, Texas. Your paycheck is funded by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development and odds are you’ll only have a handful of housing units to oversee.

“The executive director of the Housing Authority of the City of Linden, New Jersey, for example, drew $295,000 a year for overseeing 200 government-owned housing project apartments and 350 Section 8 vouchers redeemed with private landlords,” reports Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group.

“That’s more than the same position makes in poverty-plagued Newark with 25 times as many residents, and more than the position in major cities like Washington, D.C. and Los Angeles, according to HUD’s Public Housing Authority Executive Compensation database covering 2014, the most recent available year.”

The Mabank ED’s salary is only $47,005, but then overseeing a mere 16 public housing units means the job pays nearly $3,000 per unit managed. It’s not a time-consuming job, why not have a second job? Down in Marietta, GA., the ED got $242,000 in salary, plus a $50,000 bonus!

Rosiak’s story is only the latest in a long line of exposes of waste, fraud, venality and outrages at HUD that puts it in the same infamous league of Big Government incompetence as the Department of Veterans Affairs.

MOST GENEROUS CITIES ARE ALSO MOST CHURCH-GOING: The Daily Caller News Foundation’s Thomas Phippen looks at a new Barna Group data analysis that found some huge surprises among the nation’s 50 most generous cities. Take El Paso, for example, where 92 percent of the adults in that Texas border metropolis donate to charity regularly, most through local churches.

If you are guessing there is a connection between church attendance and generosity, you got it. Just imagine how America’s social welfare scene would change if 92 percent of the adults living in the 50 largest cities were as generous as those in El Paso.

DID AUSSIE GOVERNMENT GIVE CLINTON FOUNDATION $20M, $50M OR $88M? The disclosures are all over the map on this question and the confusion reflects the apparent impossibility of knowing who gave how much when to Bill and Hillary’s favorite “charity.” Or into whose pocket the money was deposited after it was given.

Rep. Marsha Blackburn, who led the House effort that prompted the IRS to investigate the Clinton Foundation, told the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group that the foundation “has failed to accurately report tens of millions of dollars in foreign government grants, including some while Hillary Clinton was secretary of state.” Such reporting failure is a federal crime and also under multiple state charitable laws and regulations.

And the drip, drip, drip continues.

GINNIE MAE HIRED A FAKE CPA TO RUN A $1.5 TRILLION MORTGAGE PORTFOLIO: No, Luke Rosiak of the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group is not making this one up. Officials at the Government National Mortgage Association — aka Ginnie Mae – hired David Fender as vice president and chief financial officer in April 2014.

They did this despite a background check that revealed Fender’s highly dubious credentials, including falsely claiming to be a registered CPA, being fired from his previous job for working for another company on company time, and much, much more.

“Fender was hired as Ginnie Mae’s CFO despite an undistinguished resume of failed business deals in Japan and jobs with U.S. companies he didn’t keep for long. His pet project was Cold Energy Systems, which sells steel tanks to governments,” Rosiak reports.

“The reference check done during Fender’s Ginnie Mae background investigation revealed his penchant for taking and neglecting corporate jobs to pay the bills while he brokered big-dollar side deals.” And then there was that $128 million tax deficiency he claimed not to know about. Sleep tight tonight, folks, because your Government Sponsored Entities are in the best of hands.

MEDIA MATTERS FLINGS ANOTHER FACT-FREE SALVO DEFENDING CLINTON: David Brock, Hillary Clinton’s favorite attack dog, had his minions at Media Matters for America fire off another cluster of half-truths, evasions and vituperation at a journalism outfit with the temerity to report facts about the Clinton Foundation. But this one sets a new low mark for ignoring facts that are no less obvious than Brock’s obeisance to Hillary Clinton.

ARE EPA OFFICIALS LYING TO US OR THEMSELVES? Here’s why that’s a reasonable question: The fact the same EPA that recently said the Gold King Mine region of Colorado should be declared a Superfund cleanup area because of fish kills caused by mine waste also published its own internal study saying fish kills in the area were happening before any mines were ever dug there.

After fighting it at every previous turn, residences of the Colorado mining region recently succumbed to the EPA’s long campaign to win the Superfund designation, which, according to the Daily Caller News Foundation Investigative Group’s Ethan Barton, gives the federal agency immense economic power in the area. But that may change with Barton’s revelation of EPA’s contradictory evidence.

BELIEVE IT OR NOT, THERE IS REAL NEWS OUTSIDE OF CLEVELAND: Take, for example, the Government Accountability Office’s report that the cost of tax breaks for special interests, $1.2 trillion, now exceeds the cost of discretionary spending, $1.1 trillion, in the federal budget last year.

Then there’s sentencing of Warren Graves to three years in prison and a fine of $55,000? Who is Graves and what crime did he do? He was a key aide to three District of Columbia mayors, including most notably the infamous Marion Barry, and Vincent Gray, whose campaign was plagued by allegations of serious campaign finance abuses. What Graves did is filing a false tax return.